The talks collapsed July 25 with Washington unable to get the concessions it wanted from the Palestinian leadership. The negotiations revolved around the future of Jerusalem, as well as the Palestinian demand for the right of return of all refugees forced out of their homeland.

Palestinians have never accepted Israeli rule over Jerusalem, which was supposed to be an "international zone" under a 1947 UN plan to partition Palestine into Israeli and Arab states.

Washington has pretended to be neutral, asking both sides to compromise, but siding with the Israeli regime and pressuring the Palestinians to concede as much as possible.

The Israeli regime has insisted on making Jerusalem its capital. Because of the international authority won by the Palestinian struggle, however, most governments in the world do not recognize Israeli control over the city. The Zionist forces annexed East Jerusalem shortly after seizing it in the 1967 war.

Commenting on the Camp David talks, Israeli cabinet member Michael Melchior said July 21 that his government backed a "proposal which accepts Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem as an undivided city and has some signs of joint sovereignty, expanded [Palestinian ] self-administration of some of the Arab Muslim quarters in the outskirts of Jerusalem." He said the Zionist regime would also annex nearby Israeli settlements located in the West Bank.

"It seems to be something new on the face of it, but when you look at the substance, there is nothing new," said Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, referring to the talks, which began July 11. She rebuked Melchior's comments about the Israeli regime conceding outlying sections of Jerusalem. [Those parts] "are ours anyway," she added.

"Short of total Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, there is not a ground for an agreement," said Hassan Abdel Rahman, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative in Washington and spokesperson for Arafat. "We recognize Israeli full sovereignty over West Jerusalem in return for full Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem."

Abdel-Rahman's remarks were the first PLO public statement expressing willingness to recognize 52 years of de facto Israeli control over West Jerusalem--a significant concession.  
 
Five decades of Zionist occupation
In 1948 Zionist military forces assaulted Palestinian villages and drove 3 million Palestinians from their homes and out of Palestine--scattering them throughout the Middle East. The state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15 that year and West Jerusalem was taken over by Tel Aviv. East Jerusalem came under Jordanian government control.

Jerusalem was divided for 20 years until 1967, when the U.S.-backed Zionist regime launched another war, seizing the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. In 1980 Tel Aviv declared Jerusalem to be its undivided capital to remain "united for ever under Israeli sovereignty."

After annexing East Jerusalem, the Israeli government enlarged it to about three times its original size by extending the border to maximize the land area, while reducing the number of Palestinians who lived within the city's expanded boundary. The Zionist regime encircled East Jerusalem with Jewish suburbs to set up virtual fortresses between the West Bank and the city. The policy of successive Israeli governments was to increase the population of Israelis in that city until they outnumbered the Arabs. Today, however, there are about 200,000 Palestinians and a similar number of Israelis in East Jerusalem.

By Israeli law, Arab residents of East Jerusalem are entitled to the same benefits as Jewish residents, such as health insurance, but the Palestinians overwhelmingly refuse to claim Israeli citizenship.

"Do you think that because of the few shekels I get from the national insurance, I want to give up my homeland?" said 70-year-old Khader Jabsheh from Shufat, an Arab neighborhood that Israel annexed after the 1967 war. "The insurance I get is my right. It is not a gift from Israel. I have been paying taxes for over 30 years and I am entitled to get some of this money back."

Palestinians have been waging daily demonstrations since the beginning of the Camp David talks, pressing the Palestinian leadership to stiffen its spine in demanding the return of all West Bank and Gaza territory captured in the 1967 war and the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their homes in what is now Israel.

About 1,500 people rallied July 22 in Gaza and another 500 held a similar demonstration in the West Bank town of Ramallah that day in actions called by the Palestinian group Hamas.  
 
Announcement of Palestinian state
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Central Council has set September 13 as a date for establishing an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinian National Council first proclaimed statehood in 1988.

The talks at Camp David came after seven years of U.S.-sponsored negotiations. In 1993 Tel Aviv and the PLO held talks in Oslo, Norway, to establish an interim agreement for Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The following year, Tel Aviv withdrew most of its forces from Gaza and Jericho, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was formed, and Arafat was elected president of the Palestinian Authority, which now has administrative and security control over all the major cities in the West Bank and most of the area of the Gaza Strip.

The West Bank territory under Palestinian rule comprises only 2 percent of the land there. Another 14 percent is under joint PNA-Israeli control.

Under the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, signed by then prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland, the jointly controlled areas and another 13 percent of West Bank land was to be placed under Palestinian control and Israeli troops removed from the area.

The Netanyahu coalition government collapsed over implementation of this agreement and Tel Aviv suspended the Wye deal. Even if the Palestinians regained every inch of West Bank land stolen by the Zionist regime, it would only amount to 22 percent of the Palestinian land before the 1948 war.

"We gave already, we gave 78 percent of Palestine," said Afif Ahmad, a Palestinian official. "What more do the Israelis want from us? They should make peace with us while Arafat is still alive."

The various "peace" accords are the product of combined factors, both the failure of the Israeli government to crush the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, and the bourgeoisification of the PLO leadership.

Since the Oslo and Wye accords, the PLO leadership has continued to turn its eyes away from the ranks of the Palestinian workers and farmers, and to rely more and more on the bourgeois regimes in the region and on reaching an accommodation with Washington in the struggle for a Palestinian nation.

"This is the most important thing to us, the strategic friendship of the United States," an unnamed Palestinian official told the Washington Post. "Without that we have nothing."

Meanwhile, Palestinians' living standards have deteriorated since the 1993 Oslo agreement. Last year unemployment topped 40 percent in the West Bank and 55 percent in Gaza. Tel Aviv still retains tight control over borders, economic arrangements, and most trade that reaches the two areas. Many Palestinians, blaming the Israeli government for the social crisis, are skeptical about the latest negotiations.

"In 1993 we said 'O.K. the Oslo deal is not good, but if it does something for the economy, then all right,'" said Bassem Tannous, a worker in the West Bank town of Ramallah. "But we've lost so much. We can't travel without restrictions; nothing moves without Israel's permission. My private opinion? There won't be a good deal with the Israelis."